Erica Schair-Cardona

Erica Schair-Cardona has over twenty years of experience working with vulnerable populations in the public interest law sphere. Her first job out of law school was as an Equal Justice Works Fellow and then Staff Attorney at the Rocky Mountain Children’s Law Center in Denver, Colorado where she represented abused and neglected children, foster parents and families. She represented children in Dependency and Neglect proceedings as well as Delinquency proceedings. Additionally, she was part of Adams County’s first Dependency and Neglect Drug Court where she was one of two attorneys appointed to advocate for the children who were under the court’s jurisdiction.

Upon moving back to Portland, Maine, she became the first Staff Attorney at the Volunteer’s Lawyers Project where she both assisted and recruited attorneys throughout the State to represent VLP’s clients. Additionally, she coordinated and recruited attorneys for VLP’s Protection from Abuse project in the Portland District Court. After leaving VLP to have her children, Erica became the Director of the Healing Healthcare Project for the Center for Preventing Hate. The Healing Healthcare Project was a program designed to address and intervene in bias and harassment in Maine’s hospital and healthcare settings. As a seasoned Board member herself, for a number of years Erica served as the co-facilitator for Lift 360’s Emerging Leaders program which was a project dedicated to placing young, trained leaders on nonprofit boards through the Southern Maine region. She returned to the law in 2018 when she joined the Refugee Human Rights Clinic (RHRC) as an Adjunct Clinical Professor. Since being part of the RHRC, she has supervised students on many of the individual representation cases in the RHRC docket, and now as the Outreach and Advocacy Attorney she is able to focus on RHRC’s policy, advocacy and outreach work.

Erica is from Maine and is grateful to be raising her children in a state that is much more diverse than the one she left in the late 1990s. She is involved in her community, volunteering and serving on various boards, and previously having volunteered at the Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project where in 2018 she won the Asylum Project Volunteer Award. She is deeply committed to Maine and those who are finding a new home in Maine.

Erica holds a B.A. in Political Science from Middlebury College where she graduated cum laude and received the Barbara Buchanan ‘62 Memorial award for a graduating woman who excelled academically and exhibited Ms. Buchanan’s ideal of service. Prior to going to law school she worked in San Francisco as a paralegal at Van Der Hout (previously Van Der Hout, Brigaliano and Nightingale) where she focused on the firm’s business immigration practice, as well as their pro bono asylum cases. After working in immigration law and deciding that law was a fit, Erica enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania Law School (now called University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School). While in law school, Erica was active in the Philadelphia public interest legal community, the Gittis Center for Clinical Legal Studies and was on the University of Pennsylvania’s Journal of Labor and Employment Law. Erica graduated from Penn Law in 2003, cum laude, and received the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers award for the student who excelled in Family Law.